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I spent all of yesterday traveling from polling place to polling place with election observers from a nonprofit, nonpartisan group called Colorado Common Cause. Its volunteers don’t care whom people vote for, they just want all voters to be able to vote. The Republican secretary of state, Scott Gessler, had made some efforts to keep mostly Democratic groups away from the polls. He sent out letters asking many Hispanic voters to provide proof of citizenship—which they’re not required to do—and his office did not send mail-in ballots automatically to any voter who missed the 2010 midterms. The Latino vote, in turn, devastated the GOP here. In Colorado, they went for Obama 75 percent to 23 percent and made up 14 percent of the electorate , a one-point increase over their share in 2008. That doesn’t mean there weren’t problems. At times, voters were told they were at the wrong polling place without being offered a provisional ballot or told a utility bill was unacceptable identification...

(AP Photo/The Greeley Tribune, Joshua Polson) Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan makes his way through the crowd shaking hands and greeting attendees individually after his speech at Island Grove Regional Park in Greeley, Colorado on November 1, 2012. Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is criticizing President Barack Obama's suggestion of creating a secretary of business. I n Colorado, polling shows that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are still neck and neck. Both campaigns are fighting for every vote, and held campaign events only 50 miles apart Thursday. In the morning, Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan visited Greeley, a city of almost 93,000, where local county commissioner Sean Conway warmed up the crowd. By the time early in-person voting ends today, the secretary of state estimates that 80 percent of voters will already have voted, either at the booth or by mail. Conway asked the crowd to raise their hands if they had already voted, and said, “Well...

By the time President Bill Clinton walked into the gym at Adams City High School in Commerce City, Colorado, the crowd was ready. Just before 6 p.m., the former president entered the stage; the students and faculty soaked him with wild applause, bringing out the familiar Clinton smile that feeds on such adoration. He thanked the school’s principal and superintendent, cracked a few jokes about being on the campaign trail, then turned serious. “I am more enthusiastic about President Obama this time than I was when I campaigned for him four years ago,” he said. “I’d like to tell you why.” That launched one of Clinton’s famous lists. There are three big questions about the future of this country. But the number of issues he enumerated in a speech that lasted almost an hour was more than three. The former president touted Obama’s accomplishments better than Obama has himself done thus far: halting the Great Recession, bringing back Detroit, expanding health-care coverage, and improving...

Unlike 10 other states this year —the most strict of which are Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kansas—Colorado has no law that will require voters to show up at the polls with photo identification* on Election Day. Voting-rights activists say such laws will disenfranchise the poor, young, or very old—voters that tend to lean Democratic—and point out that the in-person vote fraud these laws are intended to address is exceedingly rare. But voter-ID laws are only the most obvious way to make it harder to vote. Colorado’s current Republican secretary of state, Scott Gessler, was elected in 2010, and it wasn’t long before he started to implement new rules that go after Democratic voters. “For the first time I can remember, we’re getting e-mails from everyday citizens saying things like, ‘I’m afraid my votes aren’t going to count, that the machines aren’t going to work,’” says Olivia Mendoza, executive director of CLLARO, a civic-engagement organization for Latinos in the state. “There’s a...

(Monica Potts/The American Prospect) A front lawn in Littleton, Colorado This is part one of the Prospect ’s weeklong series on the swing districts that could determine the national outcome on November 6. G reg Archuleta lives in Golden, Colorado, where he worked for the Coors brewery for 34 years until he retired in 1999. Archuleta, who is 73, volunteers for the Democratic Party in the larger Jefferson County area, 778 square miles of suburbs just west of Denver that holds half a million people. On a recent Saturday drive, Archuleta was worried. For the past few months, he’s been asking property owners with backyards facing the highway if they would hang giant signs for President Barack Obama and the local congressman, Democrat Ed Perlutter, who’s in a tough battle for re-election. Now, some of the Obama signs had come down; more and more signs for Mitt Romney were up. Archuleta drove between shopping malls and new condos and subdivisions, investigating the grassy tracts between road...